Learn

Lots of mail from people who want to flip the funnel. The obvious beneficiaries of this sort of strategy are organizations that need traffic, that make a wide range of products or have new ones all the time, that want to grow, that doing something newsworthy and that have an idea worth spreading.

And I’ll respond with seven questions right back:

1. How many bloggers do you have honest conversations with? (not press releases or email blasts).

2. How many bloggers get your new stuff for free?

3. When you send out news, is it really news? Or just fluff because you had nothing new to say?

4. Are you making it easy for your happiest customers to have a blog or a podcast or a lens?

5. Does your product or service work better for a user if other people start using it? (fax machines, for example, don’t work so well if you’re the only one who has one!)

6. Do you ever intentionally launch products or services that are adored by part of your audience–and not liked one bit by the rest?

7. Is there a way you can separate the idea from the thing that people actually pay for? Free ideas spread farther and faster…

If most of your answers are "no," then the problem might not be with the specifics of your tactics, but might be at the strategy you’re bringing to the table. More and more, organizations are discovering that making something virusworthy is the single most important step in the work they do.